


Oikos

by Siria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-30
Updated: 2006-10-30
Packaged: 2017-10-03 19:37:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The leader of the Ahn Tuu is an elderly woman who reminds Rodney an awful lot of his late grandmother, if his grandmother had ruled with an iron fist over ten million people and not just over the McKay clan—tiny, wizened, birdlike and deceptively fragile, a woman who is still clinging to life thanks to the combined effort of a lot of will and a hell of a lot of moonshine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oikos

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Eliza.

The leader of the Ahn Tuu is an elderly woman who reminds Rodney an awful lot of his late grandmother, if his grandmother had ruled with an iron fist over ten million people and not just over the McKay clan—tiny, wizened, birdlike and deceptively fragile, a woman who is still clinging to life thanks to the combined effort of a lot of will and a hell of a lot of moonshine.

Rodney would have argued strongly against lighting a match in the tiny reception room where they stood facing the woman and her retinue, because even with the experience of dealing with alcohol fumes that he gained in Siberia, his eyes are watering. The smell of stale alcohol is rank and overwhelming, but the Ahn Ree still looks out steadily from beneath the weight of her ornamental head-dress, eyes black and glittering.

"And who are they to you?" she says to Sheppard.

"This is Doctor Rodney McKay," Sheppard says for the second time, "Teyla Emmagan, and this here is Ronon Dex."

"Who are they to you?" the Ahn Ree says again. Her voice cracks and wavers, and Rodney thinks of his grandmother again, of how she was before the end.

"They're my team," Sheppard says again. He speaks carefully now, slowly, explaining it like Rodney imagines he would to a small child, or someone with a head injury; Rodney knows that a lot is riding on striking a trade agreement with the Ahn Tuu, and they can't afford to mess this up. "We explore together, trade some, work together, maybe even make some friends along the way. There is no I in team and all that."

Sheppard's smile is bright and even; next to him, Ronon shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

"No," the Ahn Ree says again, and now there is definite annoyance in her voice, the trinkets and baubles on her head-dress jingling in time with her agitation. "No. I say, 'who are they to you?', and you do not tell me all. How is this trust, how is this alliance, if you do not tell me?"

Sheppard's smile never wavers, never lessens, but Rodney can see the difference—this is the smile that asks for everything, and promises nothing. "They're _my team_," he says again, voice tight.

This time, the old woman smiles.

* * *

Sometimes, Rodney can't quite pinpoint the moment when that became true. When it became more than just going off-world as part of AR-1, when he began to think of himself as part of Sheppard's team. Sometimes he thinks it all began before the first Wraith siege, sometimes he thinks it was much later. Sometimes, he thinks it happened back on Ahn Tuu, standing in front of that woman whose body was already crumbling away though she was still breathing, all three of them watching Sheppard and waiting to see what would happen next. Sometimes, he thinks it wasn't any of those times at all.

He can always pinpoint the moment when he realised where it was all heading, though, when he realised that they were more than a team. More than just Sheppard's team, too. It was on a day they had arbitrarily decided was a Wednesday on Atlantis, all four of them sprawled out on a balcony; near enough to the Gate Room that they can get there quickly in an emergency, far enough away that everyone knows not to disturb them if it's anything but. It's been a long week—_a long year_, Teyla says, but calmly—and Rodney thinks that if anyone deserves to lie out in the sun, tell stupid jokes and eat rationed junk food, let everyone else take care of everything else, and get shit-faced at two in the afternoon, it's them.

Rodney sits back against the wall and looks at them. Teyla's hair is copper and bronze in the sunlight; Ronon is relaxed, asleep, head pillowed on Teyla's thigh. John sits next to them, head tipped back, throat long and working as he swallows down yet another one of Rodney's carefully horded Molson's.

Rodney finds himself leaning into them, thinks of what he would do for them without hesitation, what they have done for him, and finds himself thinking _I'm theirs_ with such startling clarity that his hands are shaking when he pulls the cap off the next bottle.John looks up at him only a few moments later, but when he does, Rodney is smiling.

* * *

In the end, it takes longer to get them there than Rodney thought; then again, five years ago, he would never have thought this possible at all—that he would step though a wormhole to another galaxy, another life, and find out so much, find out this. The scarred warmth of Ronon's back, the earnest way he kisses; the way John likes to be touched, the way John likes to touch all of them, open palms and hands spread wide; the way Teyla looks astride him, the startled noise she makes when she comes; the way they all bring Rodney to his knees, over and over and over.

Rodney's never had this before, nothing like this, and he tries not to let himself think about it too closely. He doesn't think he can understand it, not yet at least; and afterwards, in a tangle of limbs and lazy heat, the four of them dozing on the bed, he thinks he doesn't really want to, anyway. It would all still come far closer to pathetic gratitude on his part than he is entirely comfortable with.

* * *

One of Corrigan's chattering monkeys seems to spend her days writing reams of completely unpublishable papers about the Ancients' culture and the layout of Atlantis—the abstracts of which Rodney, as Head of Science, has to look over once a month and sign off on, because someone, somewhere, has decided that anthropology counts as a science. Papers on the interstices between private and public space in Ancient society. Papers on the open nature of the Atlantean gate room, and what that implies about the Ancients' political structure. One massive tome—complete with indices and appendices enough to put Rodney's first Master's thesis to shame—all about the suites on the lower west side of Pier B, one of which is now unofficially occupied by the four of them. Rodney gapes at it for long moments before scrawling his signature across it.

"You know," Rodney says that night, lying on his back and huffing his indignation at having to vet papers for Daniel Jackson's approval at the gently curving ceiling, "she managed to get twenty pages out of how the size and positioning of the bedroom in these suites is proof positive of some kind of institutional Ancient polyamory. An entire attempts at a rational and scientific hypothesis based on, on the relative size and location of these bedrooms in comparison to the others. It's, it's—well, anthropology is not a science, is what it is, and—"

"Rodney," John mutters sleepily, face mashed into his pillow.

"But really," Rodney says, "if you think about it, it's more than a little ridiculous. I don't know how you can be so sanguine about the prospect that decisions are made at the SGC, based on the information provided by Schrödinger's Archaeologist and his merry band of soft scientist idiots. Decisions that affect our lives, based on some moron thinking that the fact someone's oriented their room north-south and used a—""_Rodney_," Teyla says, voice drifting up from beneath a tangle of hair, from where her head rests on his stomach.

"Sorry," Rodney says, a little more quietly, smoothing one hand over her hair in apology, and Teyla _hmpfh_s against his stomach, a soft little burst of air that means she is mollified.

There is silence for a moment, before Rodney blurts out, "But honestly—", and Teyla swears and John pulls the covers up over his head.

"McKay," Ronon says from his spot on the mattress, the place right on the edge where he usually curls up to sleep. His eyes are closed, and his voice is pitched low. "Isn't she kind of right?"

"Well," Rodney says sharply, "that would require us to have selected these rooms for the purpose of—oh my god." His eyes widen. "This isn't just—this. We're, all of us, we're in an actual _relationship_."

John hits him over the head with a pillow.

* * *

Rodney's never been in a quote unquote actual relationship before. He's enjoyed occasionally quite athletic sex with several people over an extended period of time—he was with Annette for nearly a year, before she kicked him out, and he supposes that technically he and Mark were together for a little over that, if you ignore the fact that Mark was at CERN and Rodney was in Siberia, and their relationship consisted mostly of blazing arguments and fast and sloppy blowjobs anyway. Before, if someone had asked him, he would have called them relationships; now, he doesn't call them much of anything at all.

Jeannie e-mails him several times a week, lengthy screeds in lower-case type that are sent through all at once in the monthly data-burst. At the end of the last one, after a diatribe about the idiocy of Madison's teacher, a recipe of Kaleb's for left-over tofurkey, and a few lines of equations that back up some of Rodney's latest research, there is a single line that says "mer, you seem happy."

 

Rodney's fingers don't hesitate to type out "I am"; but he still sits and stares at the screen for a long time, long enough to make Ronon drag him away from the desk, over to the bed, and Rodney murmurs happiness into Ronon's skin, cries out when Teyla bites down on the sensitive skin where neck meets shoulder.

* * *

If Doctor Mäki is right, Rodney thinks, and their space defines them, defines who they are, defines belonging, then this is what he has around him. He has his city and his friends. He has his work, discoveries that terrify and thrill him all at once. He has his home, four rooms at the edge of the city that are filled with his work and John's surfboards and Ronon's knives and all those ceremonial things of Teyla's that he can never quite understand, much as he pretends he does. He has his team around him, he has them and they have him.

He thinks, if he were to go back to that planet now, back to the Ahn Ree and her questioning gaze, if she were to ask him _what are they to you?_, he would know the answer—he would say, _they are everything to me that I am to them._

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Oikos (The Optometry Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/163842) by [panisdead](https://archiveofourown.org/users/panisdead/pseuds/panisdead)




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